Xerces JAR on GAE project's classpath leads to "SAXParserFactoryImpl not found"

Question

I'm using the Eclipse plugin for Google App Engine and I'm having a strange issue with a Xerces dependency. On of my classes depends on the Apache Xerces JAR which I have added to the project's classpath. This however, triggers an error when starting the Jetty app server:

WARNING: failed 
com.google.apphosting.utils.jetty.DevAppEngineWebAppContext@6efde050 
{/,/Users/lenni/dev/gate/war} 
javax.xml.parsers.FactoryConfigurationError: Provider 
org.apache.xerces.jaxp.SAXParserFactoryImpl not found

When I remove the xercesImpl.jar from my classpath jetty starts fine, however then my classes don't compile anymore since the dependency is missing.

This very much sound like this issue, however I tried switching to JRE 1.6 and still no joy.

Answer 1

This appears to relate to Issue 1367 in the GAE/J buglist. Comments 15, 16, and 17 seem to indicate a workaround.